Posts by Oneman2Many

SpaceX claims it will put a Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale system into orbit next year

Re: Estimates of SpaceX's launch cost

Any reason for the downvote or just hatred for Musk ?

Re: Estimates of SpaceX's launch cost

Starlink has contacted multiple missions where their orbit is higher than Starlink. Polaris Dawn was using Starlink and that max altitude was 1,400Km.

Re: Estimates of SpaceX's launch cost

It can easily be launched on a F9 if they haven't sorted out cargo Starship by then.

Spurs boots VMware, cites 85% licensing saving

Re: another big name boot VMWare into touch

Are you implying that Spurs was a big customer of VMWare ?

The majority of corporate IT is now off premises for the first time

Re: Cloud Repatriation

There are plenty of CaaS solutions for on-prem cloud run apps, most advertised with the ability to cloud balance or cloud burst.

SaaS is a bit different cost wise as you generally won't be paying a hosting cost and hosting will almost certainly be shared, so hosting will be bundled into the overall charge so little chance of bringing it on-prem and generally you wouldn't want to.

Re: Failure modes and unplanned outages

Badly architected applications who think that being in 'the cloud' automatically means HA. Being in the cloud is no different to on-prem, architect for multiple instances with load balancers and realtime data replication if your application is that important.

Give it a few years and as companies find out the true cost of being off-prem they will start bringing hosting back on-prem and so the cycle will continue.

SpaceX to try its luck again with Starship Flight 13 after engines and weather say no

Re: Public company woes

Military are already testing rapid deployment, currently with orbital loads. Rocket Labs recently set a record for 17 hours from initial phone call to payload in orbit, I believe that was a 'unpreped' rocket. That included transporting the payload to launch site.

Crazy as it sounds, despite the size Starship prop load time is faster that F9 at under an hour, including pre-chill its around 5 hours. However if SpaceX ever reach their goal of multiple launches per day per site then in theory they wouldn't need to schedule a new launch and military could replace the payload on the next launch which might only be a few hours time. And you would keep your payloads at the launch site ready to go.

SpaceX have recently tested Starfall, puck shaped re-entry capsule capable of 1 ton payload and by coincidence fits on the Starship pez dispenser.

The other thing to note that unless the destination has anti-ballistic defence then delivery is going to be very hard to stop unlike giant lumbering cargo plane. Imagine being able to deliver an unstoppable army of drones within hours of the guy in the Whitehouse giving the go ahead.

Re: Public company woes

"but there's almost no 100t class payloads needing to be launched."

You even said yourself, there are 42,000 Starlink sats that need launching. Much like F9, they have created their own market. That is excluding the DoD payloads for golden dome or whatever its called. DoD have already enquired about having their own fleet of Starships and launch pads that they will operate themselves.

Re: No RSD*

Keep up with news, permission to fly over populated area was granted earlier this week, page 16 has the flight path. Interesting they expect around 300 aircraft flights affected per Starship landing.

https://www.faa.gov/space/stakeholder_engagement/spacex_starship/DraftTieredEAandAppendices_July2026.pdf

Re: Successful launch

You are missing the point, there is more performance available, 37 tons is not the limit for Starship.

And they have shown catching with asymmetric thrust isn't an issue, they have done it twice with the booster and that is considerable bigger.

Re: No RSD*

It did broadcast for 11 hours post splashdown but agree there are no plans to tow it back to shore. There were reports that it was taking in water in the payload hatch though tanks were still install so staying buoyant.

I know Elon posted about going for a catch attempt on IFT-14 but honestly it makes sense to controlled splashdown off the west coast off the US first.

Re: Successful launch

There have a been a few videos stating that if they had started booster landing burn just 300 to 400 meters earlier then they would have been able to land even with failed engines.

Don't know how much left in the gas tanks but the way it left the launch pad there is more payload performance there, Plus the vented quite a lot of spare propellant once the ship reached space.

FAA review of request to fly over land is due to conclude on 3rd Aug.

BTW, the video they published mentioned that the 20 sats were 37 tons not 34t.

NASA Swift rescue mission spins into trouble during commissioning

Re: turtles

Rocket Labs Electron is an option though the 20 degree inclination orbit makes it difficult and potentially out of the capabilities of Electron. Its unlikely to ride share on Starlink but SpaceX do offer rideshare mission though I read they aren't taking any more orders.

Re: reaction wheels again ?

10 months and $30m including launch and mission costs. In space terms, that is a rounding error for many projects.

Re: turtles

they actually have another sat, just no way of launching it without Pegasus

The last Space Shuttle returned to Earth 15 years ago

Re: The Essential Difference

To some extent yes, they outsourced too much engineering skills. Isaacman is working on bring more skills back inhouse but might be a case of too little, too late.

Burnham wants Big Ecommerce to bankroll Britain's pubs

Re: Pretty much all costs are simply too high in the UK

Its not tax killing the high street but greedy developers along with weak councils who are in the pockets of developers. Plenty of individual high street owners I know are being priced out of the market by landlords.

SpaceX Starship Flight Test 13 takes issue with the 'flight' bit

Re: SpaceX stock

"I'm also curious just how much of a market there is for big birds, ie customers for Starship"

The original use case was getting a lot of payload and people to Mars though that seems to have dropped off the agenda. Its all Starmind and Starlink now with lunar exploration being a side quest.

Re: Hollywood accounting

The inflated valuation is almost all based on Starmind. Launching rockets it pretty much a sideshow for stock price.

SpaceX rocket business advantage currently is there is no other launcher available and the only one that can do crew missions to ISS. Crew missions will still be required potentially till 2032 if ISS doesn't fall apart before then (I believe Russia has now agreed to at least 2030) and surely its a matter of time that BONG and Vulcan reach production status. So yes, they can't fail but its a temporary thing.

Was watching NFS and they big limitation now is deluge tanks. Until they get the water pipe from Brownsville finished and more storage added then they need to ship in more water after each attempt.

Actually deluge is a bit of a bottleneck, they can potentially recycle starship in the 90 min launch window as long as they don't fire the engines but deluge is once and down, if it starts then it takes 4 hours to reprime it even if they had enough water.

Re: Artemis schedule is political nonsense

There are different levels of confidence and yes they are still testing but its not longer a case of launch and pray, I'm sure there will be RUDs (I'm not including the post splash down ones) but they will be rarer.

Re: Artemis schedule is political nonsense

Partially being public but more so that they can't afford any more major delays due to NASA, starlink and starmind. The days of attempting a launch and see what happens are over.

Thought Monday was optimistic, earliest next attempt has been pushed back to Thursday.

Booster is already back in Megabay. Next attempt is scheduled for Monday, that is a pretty quick turnaround if it happens.

They recover over 80% of propellant from detanking, maybe even more these days. Allows them to attempt another launch the next day without needing 200 more tanker deliveries. OK, there is some buffer in the tank farm but its not enough for two launch attempts.

Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Re: Without a lander, you can't land on the Moon. It's really that simple

The original Mars mission was going to be one-way, they had thousands of applicants.

Re: unclear deterrent

" It relies on missiles that are leased from the USA. They have to be sent there for servicing and maintenance."

That is correct for servicing and maintenance, however UK controls the warheads and we have a minimum number of missiles in patrolling subs that we control and don't need US command codes or anything. If I remember we keep 8 missiles at sea at any time, each with 3 warheads (yeap, we get 8 missiles / 24 warheads for a cost of around $40bn for 25 years), and with parliament agreement that can be increased to 40 though those would need to obtained from US storage facility but in theory doesn't need US approval.

Bridenstine obviously has a very short memory, he was the administrator when HLS was selected so I don't know why is coming out and saying its too complicated, you frecking selected it.

And I know exactly why he is coming out with nonsense, he is still on the payroll of old space. I don't know if he is making a play for the administrator role again or there is a option from old space instead of SpaceX HLS, makes little sense.

T-Mobile appears to be quitting VMware – and fighting a very familiar battle for support rights on the way out

Re: Meanwhile…

"Is it a straight drop in replacement for Vmware "

KVM is just a type 2 hypervisor layer, think of it like Hyper-V for Windows desktop.

What it doesn't have is any management layer, the ability to create clusters, manage storage, networking, monitoring, reporting, etc. You know, the bits that actually make VMWare useful.

So each vendor has their value add, Proxmox, Nutanix, OpenShift, etc That would provide a comparable solution and would meet regulatory requirements. Most solutions now use K8 to manage the environment and thus can offer container and VM hosting on the same platform, effectively treating VM as a container. They all offer tools to assist migration though vary in their quality.

Good news for apps is that KVM is fairly universal across the platforms so compatibility should be fairly between the solutions and VMWare. We do come across vendors who haven't embraced KVM virtualisation but normally its more like some extra revenue for certification.

Re: I haven't followed this saga closely

But does anyone understand what Broadcom's play is here?

Have you had your head buried in the sand for the last 40 years. Its not only Broadcom, its been industry standard for as long as I have been working in IT. Broadcom is just the latest in a never ending list of takeovers working out against customer interest.

Re: Delightful idea

Most organisations won't allow apps that aren't supported which is why things like free or open source are difficult to implement.

In cases like financial institutions and possibly key infrastructure like telfos, it would be against regulations especially something that could bring down the whole service.

Citrix says it's back as a mainstream server virtualization player that won't send scary bills

I didn't say XenServer.

We buy the VDI as a service from Citrix. They used used XenServer running on Cisco UCS when we had it on prem but using Citrix Cloud when they migrated. From my understanding Citrix are still using XenServer at the underlying infrastructure for their cloud solution.

Space Shuttle Endeavour stacks up nicely for new California exhibit

Re: Wait a second

Yes, they are slides. NSF had a detailed article including pictures of the slides and interviews with staff.

Went to see it before they started the work, its a really good visit, not just shuttle but the whole museum.

Space Force goes to (pretend) orbital war following record-fast Rocket Lab launch

The real question is what is the DoD planning on doing with Starfall ?

Tesco is sprinting to quit VMware and Broadcom despite rapid migration risks

Re: is this the beginning of the end for VMWARE

As much as I hate broadcom, VMWare, they aren't going anywhere. Still have the biggest market share and are pivoting to cloud hosting.

What would accelerate their demise is applications modernising and getting off windows / linux and moving to cloud native.

NASA payload to ride commercial Mars orbiter from rocket biz yet to reach orbit

2027, for first launch maybe. There is a ton of work still required on the launch pad and its not like they have SpaceX or Blue money. If all goes well they I expect a couple more launches before risking NASA mission, they also have another mars mission on their books.

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

You or Woljek seem to be confusing Elon with SpaceX

Re: Only the Connectivity segment is turning a profit ?

"I expect that interest from private investors to keep putting money in was waning pretty hard which has required Elon to take the company public. It also needed a heavy AI component as that's the flavor of the month."

Nope, interest from private investors isn't waning at all. The issue is scale,. currently spending $2bn a year for starship development, $15bn so far and no sign of letting up.

The real investment is AI. The fab plant alone is likely going to going to cost in excess of $10bn and add on satellite, launch and operations costs, easily add another $20bn.

And scaling out more launch pads that they are going to need, they are a few billion a piece. I believe SpaceX are already talking to Space Force about Vandenburg and a possibility of an international launch site (Oz ?). They are in the process of buying 200 sq miles in Louisiana though probably not for launch purposes.

Re: Only the Connectivity segment is turning a profit ?

There infrastructure is a reasonable size and expanding, there is a issue with link capability between Colossus 1 and 2 which are not on the same LAN infrastructure.

The spent heavily on NVidia before some of the market and thus have excess capacity now plus factor in their own AI plans are not progressing as fast as they had planned.

Amazon went public in 1997 and hadn't turned a profit by then. In fact it was 2001 before they reported a profit.

She has talked about retiring a few times, I guess she wants to see out HLS or some other milestone.

Re: On the one hand....

"He has a legion of Meme-Minions and fanboys"

Fanbois and individual investors are going to make zero difference regardless how much they zombified, sadly they will just be on the receiving end of some big losses when the real investment tanks start dumping.

NASA names crew for Artemis III lunar lander rehearsal

The report says 2 days docked with BO pathfinder including entering it. Who knows how close it will be to the final lander. It will then spend one day docking to a standard Starship with a dock. NSF actually showed a nosecone with what looked like a docking portal, though it looked comically small compared to the size of Starship.

NASA did announced they are investigating assisting BO finding an alternate launcher for lander mk1 those its design is very heavily linked to NG so not sure how easy that is going to be.

SpaceX stated they have main structure for HLS completed and are currently fitting with various systems. No pictures and no date when it will be ready. They are also leaning heavily on Crew Dragon for life support, docking, lidar and other technologies. They have also been testing HLS systems at MacGregor including off nominal landing.

Being LEO, neither lander will need to perform refuelling which is a requirement for both for actual lunar mission.

Also not mentioned in the article is that NASA is also looking at the possibility of pushing Starship HLS pushing Orion from LEO to Lunar orbit. SpaceX said this would greatly reduce the number refuelling flights required. No idea if Orion dock could take the stress.

Exploding rockets and exploding hardware prices make for a lousy new normal

Memory / solid state storage prices have gone bonkers. There is no justification for the insane price increase. Servers costing under $10k last Nov are now in excess of $45k and going up 20% per month. Sure there is increased demand from AI but it just feels like price gouging currently.

Blue Origin's New Glenn makes a crater-sized dent in Artemis plans

FH has the performance but while Blue Moon Mark 1 would fit in a standard F9 fairing, Mark 2 needs a 7m fairing which would a huge increase for Falcon which currently uses a 5.2m diameter fairing for a 4.8m payload. As mentioned above there is also the small matter of hydrogen top off at the launch pad plus I believe the plan for MK2 was to use BONG upper stage propellant to top off hydrogen as well. In theory you could do it COPV but its a hell of a lot of work.

Re: I wonder...

No, NASA have all the designs for Saturn V archived away. Unfortunately all manufacturing would need to start from scratch, nothing that can't be recreated but would costs 10's of billions and years to develop. Throw in that both 39A has been completely developed by SpaceX including building on the the crawler way, Pad 39B has been redeveloped for SLS but in theory could be converted back. Same applied to crawler, VAB, etc

Anyway, there is zero point in building any more Saturn V, you have SLS with pretty much the same performance if they ever sort out the EUS.

Re: I wouldn't ride any.............

They are building 2 more pads but it takes time, both are at least a year away from completion.

Re: I wouldn't ride any.............

SpaceX does booster static fire on the launch pad, there isn't any other option.